issuevoter wrote on Oct 24
th, 2023 at 9:51pm:
The EU is forcing Big Tech to be more responsible.
Hopefully that will also include Microsoft with their current "plan" to turn millions of perfectly good PC's and laptops into landfill when Windows 10 reaches "end of life" in 2 years time.
PIRG petitions Microsoft to extend the life of Windows 10 Quote:The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has delivered a petition to Microsoft calling on the company to rethink the impending abandonment of Windows 10 in the face of millions of PCs potentially being rendered eligible for landfill overnight.
There are now less than two years until Microsoft is due to cut support for Windows 10, and at current estimates, 400 million PCs can't make the jump to Windows 11.
The petition, addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, criticizes its plans and states that customers expect their devices to last rather than be rendered obsolete by an arbitrary decision. PIRG warns that tipping that much hardware into landfills is somewhat at odds with the company's stance on the environment.
The petition reads: "All software reaches a point at which it's no longer supported, but when the consequences to our environment are this large we shouldn't accept it."
As a reminder, while Windows 10 was largely backwards-compatible with computers running older operating systems, Microsoft slapped
hardware requirements on Windows 11 that rendered machines even just a few years old unable to upgrade – the main issues center on the CPU and TPM requirements.
Of course, Windows 10 will not suddenly stop working in 2 years time but it won't receive any more security updates.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft started 'sabotaging' Windows 10 in the next 2 years to encourage people to 'upgrade' like they did with Windows 7 after W10 was released in 2015 (who can forget the eternal "Checking for Updates" message that the majority of Windows 7 users encountered when using Windows Update back then? Some people said they left their PC's on for a day or more and nothing happened.
Microsoft eventually "fixed" it after a tsunami of complaints.
Windows 7 - Windows Update Hangs On "Checking For Updates"And the infamous GWX - Get Windows 10 (Roman numeral X) campaign that saw many people turn their Windows 7 PC's off and when next turned on they had been 'magically' "upgraded" to Windows 10.
Microsoft upgraded users to Windows 10 without their OKThey stopped doing that too after
at least one lawsuit.
Oh, and Microsoft's decision to
block 7th Generation and above CPU's from getting updates for Windows 7 and 8.1 back in 2016 (this was also easily bypassed).
There are still ways to install Windows 11 on "unsupported hardware" (I've done it myself with a 10 year old motherboard fitted with a 4th Generation CPU) but who knows how long they will keep working? And hardly anyone who isn't a computer 'whiz' knows about these workarounds.
The other option will be to linstall Linux on these "unsupported" PC's after October 2025 which isn't such a bad idea seeing as Windows has turned into an advertising platform masquerading as an operating system these days (there's ways to fix that too but 'Joe Average' probably also doesn't know how to do that).
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